Rule Forty Two: The Self-Aggrandizing Website of Gavin Edwards

Chapter 11: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll (But Really, in This Chapter, Just the Drugs)

I have a long-standing policy when writing feature articles: if I take drugs with somebody I’m writing about, and if I mention in the article that they were consuming an illegal substance (in practice, that means marijuana), then I have to mention that I was as well. It only seems fair to me: if I took a hit off the joint when it was passed around the room, pretending that I didn’t would make me a hypocrite. (And most musicians are gentlemen about sharing—the memorable exception being the rapper Coolio, who sucked down most of a joint in the back seat of a limo and only offered it to me when we pulled up to MTV’s studios, in the heart of New York’s Times Square. Uh, no thanks, dude, I’ll decline to walk through Times Square with a joint in my hand.) I never had any problems with this philosophy until I wrote a cover story for Spin on Matchbox Twenty and ran up against the magazine’s house policy: they deemed it acceptable to write about musicians’ drug use, because that’s just observational journalism, but forbade writers from writing about their own, because that would be endorsing it. Much tap-dancing ensued; I ultimately wrote a paragraph that implied a great deal without actually depicting anything, not unlike the action of a PG movie.